The Ffolliots of RedmarleyHarker, L. Allen (Lizzie Allen)
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The Ffolliots of Redmarley
Harker, L. Allen (Lizzie Allen)
Mate selection -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Then one morning he saw her in Bond Street with her grandmother. She
was on the opposite side of the street rather ahead of him, but he knew
that easy strolling walk, the flat back, and proud carriage of the
head: that head with its burnished hair coiled smoothly under a
bewitching hat. They stopped to look in at Asprey's window, and he
dashed across the road in the full stream of traffic. Two indignant
taxi-drivers swore, and he reached the curb breathless, but uninjured,
just as they went into the shop.
He stood staring at the window, keeping at the same time a sharp
look-out on the door.
What an age they were!
He had just decided that the only thing to do was to go in and buy
something, when they came out.
Mary saw him at once, and his round face looked so wistful that she
greeted him with quite unnecessary warmth. She recalled him to Mrs
Grantly, who, remembering vaguely that he was a young man who had
"risen from the ranks," was also more cordial than the occasion
demanded.
He walked up Bond Street with them, piloted them across Piccadilly, and
turned with them down Haymarket, so plainly delighted to see them, so
nervous, so pathetically anxious to please, that Mrs Grantly's
hospitable instincts, fatally easy to rouse where pity played a part,
overcame her discretion. Her husband and her daughter used to declare
that she had a perfect genius for encumbering herself with impossible
people--and repenting afterwards. With dismay she realised that
Eloquent had, apparently, attached himself to them. Short of cruelly
wounding his feelings, she saw herself walking about London all day,
accompanied by this painfully polite young man. It seemed impossible
to call a taxi, and leave him desolate there on the pavement
unless . . . Mrs Grantly's heart was hopelessly soft where animals
were concerned, and just then Eloquent reminded her of nothing so much
as an affectionate dog, allowed to frisk gaily to the front door, and
cruelly shut in on the wrong side, as she said--
"We've got to meet my husband at the Stores, Mr Gallup, perhaps you'll
kindly get us a taxi, as I'm rather tired."
His woebegone face was too much for her, and she added, "We're always
at home on Sunday afternoons."
Mary rather wondered at her grannie.
The taxi drove away and Eloquent walked down Haymarket as though he
were treading on air. To-day was Friday. Sunday, oh blessed day! was
the day after to-morrow.
There were clovers nodding in her hat, a wide-brimmed fine straw hat
that threw soft shadows over her blue eyes and turned them dark as the
clear water underneath Redmarley Bridge. And he would see her again on
Sunday.
That lady, that handsome portly lady, he had been afraid of her at
first, she looked so large and imposing, but how kind she was! How
wonderfully kind and hearty she had been. It was she who had invited
him. "We are always at home on Sundays," she said. Surely that meant
he might go more than once?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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